For posterity: my thoughts on CURRENT EVENTS

I'm not one to keep up with the news, because most of it is depressing and terrifying and unless it directly affects me and my family I don't really want to know about it.  It's not that I enjoy being ignorant, but when the costs exceed the payoffs, I think that's a no brainer.  So I'm not careful about keeping up-to-date.

Yet in my grandparents' stories, I really enjoy hearing about the then-current events that shaped their lives, mostly because I enjoy seeing people in the context of history.  Learning about how my grandparents perceived the world as children during the Great Depression, or seeing the pride of the relatives of my great-uncle that died young in Normandy during WWII, or hearing my dad talk about when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon--in those moments history becomes real to me, contextualized, complex, and I realize why it's so important to record these details as much as possible.

I remember writing in my journal on New Year's Eve of Y2K (I was then a junior in high school) about the panic everyone had when they were certain our technology would crash and the world would effectively end.  I of course remember September 11th, 2001, as I had only been in classes at BYU for a week when it happened.  With many of my family members being in the military and having toured overseas in the last few years, things like war in Iraq and Afghanistan are not just abstract concepts that will someday be reduced to a few lines of dates and names in a history textbook to me.  I understand a little bit firsthand the sacrifices our military makes to defend principles they believe in, and whatever I may think of any war on an intellectual, abstract level, I can never find fault with the real men and women who fight them. 

I guess my point is this: that living in a time such as ours, with new technologies, new debates, advances (and certainly regressions) in society, natural disasters, and more, we don't really understand how much a part of history WE are.  I love that history isn't just about politicians and militaries, but it's about the everyday people who see and live through their aftermath from day to day.  It makes me want to learn a little more about current events and record my own impressions and experiences with them so that someday my own grandkids will have these weird things in their history books become real to them, too.